Free The Right to Arm Bears by Gordon R. Dickson Page A

by the lack of sunlight and they traveled, through what seemed to be an endlessly, sloping, pillared land, dimly lit by no particular source of illumination.
    Sound was less where they were, too. There were no insects to feed on the nonexistent small vegetation; and no birds to live off the insects. Occasionally, from high overhead, eighty to a hundred and twenty feet up in the loftily remote crowns of the trees, there would float down a distant chitter or chirp of some unseen animal or winged creature. Otherwise, there was only the trail, an occasional boulder, looking lost here in the wooded dimness, and the unending carpet of dead leaf forms from the trees.
    The Bluffer said nothing; and the steady rocking of his body as he swung along over the trail, now soft with earth, swayed John into a dreaminess in which nothing about him seemed real. Not the present scene, and not the whole business in which he had become engaged, seemed to have anything to do with reality. What was he doing here, strapped up on the back of an alien individual as large as a horse and headed for a duel to the death with another horse-sized individual of the same race? Such things did not happen to ordinary people.
    But, come to think of it, were there any ordinary people? When you got right down to it, thought John sleepily, nobody was ordinary.
    John dozed. An indeterminate, grey time went past; and then he was awakened by the jerk of the Hill Bluffer stopping. He straightened up, blinking, and looked about him.
    He saw that it was already dusk. In the fading light, they stood in a large grassy clearing semi-encircled by the forest trees. Directly before him was a long, low log building at least double the size of anything he had seen yet, outside of Humrog. At some short distance behind it, a broad, smooth-surfaced river gurgled, swiftly flowing around a chin of stones that led across it to be lost in the twilight and the tree shadow on the far side of the stream.
    "Light down, Half-Pint," said the Bluffer.
    Stiffly, John climbed down from the harness. His scrapes and bruises of the night before, had found time to set during his long hours in the saddle. The soft turf felt odd under his bootsoles and his calves were wooden with a mild cramp. He stamped about, restoring his circulation; and then followed the Hill Bluffer's great back as, for an instant, it blocked out the yellow light of an open doorway, in passing into the building's interior.
    Inside he found himself in a common room both much larger and much cleaner than he had been in before. The customers here at Sour Ford Inn also seemed to be quieter and less drunk than those he had encountered in other Dilbian inns, Brittle Rock for example. Gazing around for some explanation of the reason behind this difference, John caught sight of a raised dais at the far end of the room, where in a huge chair was seated a truly enormous Dilbian, grizzled with age and heavy with fat.
    Staring at this Dilbian as he walked behind the Bluffer, John ran into a table, recovered himself, and was admonished by the Hill Bluffer.
    "Don't go starting any trouble now, Half-Pint."
    "Me?" said John, so overwhelmed at the suggestion that someone his size could start trouble with lumbering Dilbians—even if he was crazy enough to want to—that he found himself at a loss for words to protest properly that he had no such intention.
    "That's right," said the Bluffer, some moments later, after they had been seated and ordered beer and food (beer only, still, for John). "This here's treaty ground, belonging to a clanless man. Nobody starts trouble here."
    "Treaty ground?"
    "Yep," said the Hill Bluffer. "One Man, he—" the food, arriving just then, put a cork in the postman's flow of words. He devoted himself to bread, cheese and beer, merely grunting when John tried to continue the conversation.
    John sat back, and sipped on his beer. He was cautious with it, this evening. He tried to catch a glimpse of the big Dilbian at